The ‘sliding scale’ of supporting candidates with the literature during doctoral studies

This is a guest post by Dr Julia Everitt a post-doctoral researcher, supervisor and facilitator of supervisory development programmes at Birmingham City University (BCU). Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash This post discusses a practitioner inquiry that I undertook, investigating how supervisors support candidates with the research literature during doctoral studies. Below, I describe this …

Thesis Supervision: the educational value of postdocs in supporting research writing

By Dr Kay Guccione I delivered this presentation at the UCL Institute of Education Event on the 9th June: 'Doctoral education and its purposes: research training for a changing world' It focuses on how doctoral writers are supported to make progress, using outcome data from a thesis mentoring programme to understand the educational value postdocs …

Supporting doctoral writers as writers

This is a guest post by Dr Rachael Cayley (@rachaelcayley), Associate Professor (Teaching Stream) in the Graduate Centre for Academic Communication, School of Graduate Studies at the University of Toronto. Rachael edits the Explorations of Style blog, all about academic writing, and is currently working on a book about thriving as a graduate writer. The piece below is based …

A proactive approach to learning doctoral writing

This post is by Dr Kay Guccione. It provides some thinking points on the supervisor’s role in developing doctoral writing. The passive model The assessment part of the PhD is almost always a lengthly written document — the doctoral thesis. It’s been this way for so many years now. Yet I see repeated again and …

Resources for Thesis Mentors

Photo by Allie Smith on Unsplash The uncertainly about how to continue with PhD study, and how to manage the transition to new working circumstances caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, has left early career colleagues feeling vulnerable, and therefore open to predatory approaches. I was prompted to write this post because I saw that a former thesis mentee …

Developing a pedagogical space for novice supervisors

This is a guest post by Dr Matthew Sillence, Lecturer in Postgraduate Education and Training, Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of East Anglia. Matthew teaches on the Masters in Higher Education Practice. The University of East Anglia has run a Masters in Higher Education Practice (MA HEP) for many years. This provides a route …

publishing during candidature: advice from candidates to supervisors

This is a guest post by Dr Shannon Mason Assistant Professor in the Department of Education at Nagasaki University and Dr Margaret Merga, Senior Lecturer at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia. It presents the learning for supervisors drawn from some of their recent research into doctoral publishing. Follow their research in the space of publishing in …

coaching PhD researchers supports their sense of progress, and reduces intention to quit.

This blog post is written by two Danish researchers and academic developers, Mirjam Godskesen, affiliated with Aalborg University, and Sofie Kobayashi, affiliated with the University of Copenhagen. Both work as private consultants, coaches, and teachers and researchers in higher education. Based on a project on coaching PhD students at Danish universities, they studied the effects …

rekindling joyful writing

 Dr Matthew Cheeseman (@eine) and I have create a video-blended workshop, ‘Writing Without Discipline’, and we are giving away the materials. In developing this workshop we wanted to introduce creative writing concepts to researchers working in any and all disciplines, as a way to support people who felt tense, anxious, about writing, or had fallen into …

postdocs can’t supervise!

Institutional and sector pressures on the doctorate, on doctoral supervision, and on academic practice, have increased in recent years, and supervision is just one element of academic practice in an increasingly high demand ‘all-rounder’ academic role. Supervision, and the supervisory relationship, is often described as the most important determinant of doctoral success (linked to success, happiness, and mental health) …